Courtesy Goodman Community Center
Food donations on dollies and carts.
These are just some of the food donations that arrived at the Goodman Community Center's Fritz Food Pantry on Monday, Nov. 3, 2025.
At the beginning of November, most food pantries are pushing to fund their Thanksgiving meal baskets. Now that FoodShare benefits are delayed due to the federal government shutdown, many pantries have launched a second food drive, or are just trying to get the word out about the ongoing need for more donations.
“There are three ways that we're asking people to support [us]: donating money, donating food, and volunteering time,” says Goodman Community Center Fritz Food Pantry manager Allison Dungan. “And I guess if we were adding a fourth, that would be spreading the word.”
Dungan says Goodman is getting a lot of questions from people about doing food drives. “It's been happening for about two weeks, but really ramped up in the last couple days.”
Federal officials said funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ran out on Saturday. The same day federal judges directed the Trump Administration to use emergency funds to continue making SNAP payments to the states. But the administration said in court filings Monday that it would send only partial payments in November.
Goodman has a “kit” for people interested in doing an effective food drive, downloadable from its website. They are not new, but have been helpful in spreading the word now. Included are PDF printable flyers and posters and a list of needed items to help people hold a “focused” food drive — themes include kitchen staples, gluten- and dairy-free items, and even birthday treats.
Additionally people are ordering items from Goodman’s Amazon list, Dungan says, and someone ordered items from Walmart from the needed items list that were delivered to the center. She’s also been scheduling times for people to deliver food collected from a drive.
The focus of a regularly scheduled volunteer meeting on Nov. 3 shifted to getting volunteers to “help sort all the donations that have been coming in,” says Dungan. “All the donations coming in are super helpful, but we're also having to have [more] volunteer shifts to help shelve them.”
Space is tight — “we're making it work,” Dungan says. “We're definitely having to get creative in terms of using carts and boxes [to hold donations] but the turnover of the stuff is high. We have the pantry [open] three days a week, so it's mostly staging things so that we can get them out.”
“We don't want what happened last week,” Dungan adds, “which was empty shelves.”
Dungan notes that donations of money help the pantry purchase items it can’t accept as donations — perishables like milk, eggs and meat — and helps “ensure that there's staff here. We rely hugely on volunteers, but we have three staff members and we need them here as well.”
“We very much hope this will be temporary,” Dungan says. “We're not really equipped to replace the loss of SNAP dollars.”
Other organizations are also ramping up efforts to respond to the loss of FoodShare dollars.
This week, Second Harvest Foodbank of Southern Wisconsin launched a drive to “double produce for immediate distribution.” As a foodbank, Second Harvest helps supply many area food pantries.
Healthy food For All, an area leader in food recovery, launched a new GoFundMe Monday.
The city of Middleton, Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District, Middleton Chamber of Commerce, and Downtown Middleton Business Association are sponsoring a community food drive for WayForward in Middleton, which has extended donation hours this week.
In a blog post, The River executive director Rhonda Adams reported that pantry staff is seeing anxiety rise among its clients and that on Oct. 28 the pantry had its busiest non-holiday day on record. It’s also seeing a “a huge spike in new donors and over 200 new volunteer applications.”
Public Health Madison and Dane County has a downloadable pamphlet listing food pantries and free meals.
